There were at least four brilliant quotes on Mad Men tonight. I'll dive into all of them tomorrow, but with limited comment I wanted to give you one of the four tonight:
Clients don't always know what's best. -- Peggy Olson
Amen to that.
Number of posts per month = amount of free time - total billable hours (topic that interest me)
There is an inverse relationship between how often I post and my billable hours. Thus, while my employment is mostly secure, my ability to comment on birthers, Barney Frank, guns at town hall meetings, Sarah Palin, the NHS being dragged through the mud, Obama's inability to control an issue, CPB and VW breaking up and the cuteness of my children is diminished.
UPDATE: I hate myself for posting about not posting...sorry.
Once again I see shades of my own experiences in this show.
Before Mad Men, when people asked me what I did for a living I tried to explain my job in terms of what I did. "I work at an ad agency, but I am not a writer or a designer. I'm in Account Services so my job is to make the Creatives and the Clients happy, all the time, while telling both that they need to compromise."
Now when people ask I say "You know that show Mad Men? I do what Pete Campbell does." And then they respond "The creepy guy...I don't like him." Exactly, no one likes the guy who forces you to compromise.
This week Pete Campbell is (finally, in his mind) promoted to Head of Accounts, only to discover that he shares the job with his polar opposite Ken Cosgrove (Campbell is ambitious, Cosgrove is laid back, almost lazy).
Pete is recounting a meeting to his wife, in which Senior Management handed out the client assignment to the Co-Heads of Accounts:
Trudy: What's the matter.
Pete: There's two Heads of Accounts. Kenny Cosgrove and I are sharing it.
Trudy: Oh, I am so sorry.
Pete: I was sitting there and they just read off a list of names, a list of companies. [Shrugs]. That's my life.
Indeed.
Oh how I have been in this meeting, and more than once. Now I am not the head of Account Services, but I have been asked to sit down and been told "You are no longer working with Company A, you are now working with Companies X, Y and Z." Ummm....yes sir.
Pete sometimes gets a bad rap. I mean, he drinks Glenlivet (one of the only Mad Men to opt for a single malt) so how bad can he be? He fights for the work (most of the time) and has the Creative team's back (most of the time). Sure he is a creep, and we are not meant to root for him, but once again I can relate to him.
In this biz, we are not in control of our own fate.
The sage of polling has spoken. Nate Silver thinks health care reform is in trouble.
I am too tired and it is too late for me to express how profoundly disappointed I am in Obama's utter mismanagement of this issue. He has messed up on the politics, the public relations and the legislative management.
If this does not pass, or if we get a watered down bill (highly likely), the President has no one to blame but himself.
I encourage everyone to make the following (or something like it) there Facebook status today:
Happy 48th Birthday to Barack Hussein Obama, born August 4th, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.
This is not intended to be a political statement, but rather a statement of fact. And I ask everyone (reguardless of your politics) to join me.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I support the President and have for some time. And while I have my problems with some of his policies and recent actions (some that I have not been able to blog about) I can no longer sit by and watch as a small group of crazy wingnuts continue to claim that he is not a natural born American citizen.
Do not doubt for one minute that the birthers will use the occasion of the President's birthday to amplify their cause. After all, they recently doctored an obviously fake "foreign" birth certificate and added that to the insane rants on cable television.
You may disagree with the President, but I hop that we can all agree on the facts.
BTW, you can also Tweet this (its under 140 characters).
One of the main contributors to YFSF is moving out of the county. As a farewell to his beloved city he posted this:
Is it possible to have a better opening four minutes to a film? I have not seen Manhattan in maybe 10 years and this clip made me want to watch right now.
Side note: I have successfully gotten MLTU to appreciate They Might Be Giants. Her favorite song? "New York City". She knows all the words and now sings it, unprompted, all the time. It's very cute.
So...is it wrong that she also knows some of the words to "Dead"?
